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Colleges Find Diversity Is Not Just Numbers

It used to be that freshman orientation here at Dartmouth College revolved around hiking up mountains and sleeping in huts along the Appalachian Trail. But this year one of the highlights was a talk by Karim Marshall, a senior, who told the 1,100 new students about his arrival on campus from a predominantly black high school in Washington.

''Everyone in my world was black,'' Mr. Marshall began. His grandmother from Mississippi could not even understand why he wanted to attend mostly white Dartmouth, he said.

In the audience, Matthew Oppenheimer, a white student from Boise, Idaho, was riveted by Mr. Marshall's story, just as Dartmouth administrators had hoped. ''I couldn't imagine what it was like to come from his community to Dartmouth,'' Mr. Oppenheimer said. ''I have such respect for him being so open.''

Decades after colleges and universities across the country began actively recruiting minority students, many campuses are more diverse than ever. But that does not mean that students connect across racial and ethnic lines.

Educators say the goal is not just to improve race relations and make minority students feel more welcome, but also to create a new category of graduate -- one they describe as culturally versatile, or culturally competent, attributes they expect will become more useful as the nation becomes increasingly diverse.

''The whole discussion used to be framed around numbers,'' said Prof. Jeffrey Milem of the University of Maryland, an expert on the racial dynamics of colleges, referring to the earlier efforts to recruit minorities. ''Now it's about what kind of educational environment is in place to allow these diverse people to learn from one another.''

Karim Marshall's talk at orientation was only part of Dartmouth's new push. This fall, signaling the college's intention, the president, James Wright, made diversity the theme of his welcoming address. Dartmouth is offering diversity training to any student or faculty member, and many are taking part. It is mandatory for all nonfaculty staff members, from administrators to groundskeepers. It is creating new lounge areas where students can gather and is even telling fraternities and sororities that they must file plans for embracing diversity -- plans for which they will be held accountable.

Theodore R. Mitchell, president of Occidental College in Los Angeles, said, ''It is our job as educators to construct conscious communities in which students and others spend time, work and play with people unlike themselves -- ethnically, ideologically, politically.''

Occidental has a 36 percent minority enrollment and is considered a leader in the effort, as are Brown, Carnegie Mellon, Harvard, Haverford, the University of Maryland, the University of Michigan, Mount Holyoke, Stanford and Swarthmore.

Most everyone agrees that Dartmouth has a lot of work ahead of it. The drive here was inspired in part by an internal report last year telling of many minority students who over the years actually ''felt damaged'' by the climate at the college. Just four years ago, a Dartmouth fraternity and sorority prompted an outcry on campus after having ''a ghetto party'' at which students dressed in so-called inner city clothes.

''To hear again so personally and repeatedly from students of color, women of all races and gay, lesbian or bisexual students who felt hurt, unvalued and ultimately less important to the mission of the college than others was searing indeed,'' the report said.

For Deanne Battle, an African-American senior from Brooklyn, the years here in rural, overwhelmingly white New Hampshire have been a hard adjustment.

''The white students are friendly in a superficial way,'' Ms. Battle said, ''but when it comes to e-mailing you Saturday night to go out, they don't.'' She said she spent much of her freshman year watching videos alone in her room, until she turned to the Afro-American Society for support.

Ms. Battle said she was tired of contending with the perception that she got here only because of affirmative action. She is also tired of being the only African-American in class and having the professor turn to her for ''the black opinion.''

''It seems,'' she said, ''as if a lot of your function as a student of color is to educate the campus.''

Her complaint is voiced by minority students at colleges across the country, said Professor Milem, of the University of Maryland. More than 40 years ago, he said, when schools began admitting minorities in larger numbers, the thinking was, ''If you just got everyone here, everything would be O.K.'' Many institutions have yet to achieve even that goal. And at those that did draw the numbers, it soon became clear that many minority students found the atmospheres so hostile that they were leaving.

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By the 1980's, colleges had begun establishing diversity deans, ethnic studies courses and ethnic and racial affinity houses to help minority students feel more at home on campus.

The idea behind affinity houses -- separate residences for different racial and ethnic groups -- was that minorities needed places where they could learn about their cultures and relax and feel comfortable on campus.

Today, administrators are talking about a different set of goals: breaking down the barriers between students of different backgrounds. Whether the latest efforts will work, however, is far from clear.

No one has a formula for success; there is not even a consensus about what success would look like. Experts say that diversity programs on college campuses amount to a constantly evolving experiment, which in some cases in the past may have done more harm than good.

''The difficulty is that higher education raced from stage to stage without ever completing any one stage,'' said Arthur Levine, the president of Columbia University's Teachers College, who has studied diversity on college campuses.

Some critics go further, saying that all the focus on diversity programs distracts from academics.

''Much of what has marched under the banner of diversity and its twin in the academy, multiculturalism, has resulted in division,'' said Bradford Wilson, executive director of the National Association of Scholars, a group that opposes the use of affirmative action in higher education and calls for strengthening undergraduate core curriculums.

But a team of researchers at the Harvard School of Education's national campus diversity project has begun trying to identify model programs. The project has so far cited efforts that bring students of different racial and ethnic groups together for structured discussions, faculty training in diversity and intensive mentoring that raises achievement levels for minority students who come from inadequate secondary schools.

In his welcoming speech to freshmen, Mr. Wright, the president, pointed out that surveys from previous classes showed that students arrived on campus wanting to transcend boundaries and make different kinds of friends, but that upon graduation they indicated that they wished they had been more successful.

''The faculty and administration are eager to help you in this challenge,'' Mr. Wright said.

At Dartmouth, Mr. Marshall and many other students praise the newest diversity efforts. ''They're trying to create as many opportunities as they can for students to get together,'' Mr. Marshall said. Training for staff members includes workshops in which they are asked to think of Dartmouth in terms of classism, racism and sexism, and then to make recommendations for improvements. They are also told to find ways to incorporate those suggestions into their own lives.

Students might be asked to participate in exercises to illustrate how much people have in common despite differences in skin color or income.

Just two months into the new school year, there are already signs that boundaries are being crossed. This fall the women at Kappa Kappa Gamma, a predominantly white sorority, have invited the men of Alpha Phi Alpha, a historically black fraternity, to dinner. And Alpha Phi Alpha is trying to encourage whites to join.

But some students think the newest diversity push is a waste of time and money. ''This racial diversity, which has been an obsession of the administration, has been misguided,'' said Chien Wen Kung, 21, a junior from Singapore. ''My opinion is that Dartmouth should be focusing on intellectual diversity.''

Mr. Wen Kung was eating lunch in the student center with a group of racially and ethnically mixed friends that included John A. Stevenson, an African-American sophomore from Louisiana.

Mr. Stevenson, 20, said he thought the hardest part for everyone was simply breaking the ice. ''My black friends ask me, 'What do I say to a white person?' '' Mr. Stevenson said. ''My white friends say, 'What do I say to a black person?' ''

Mr. Stevenson smiled. ''I tell them,'' he said, '' ' ''Hi, what's your name and where are you from?'' is a good place to start.' ''

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A version of this article appears in print on November 12, 2002, on Page A00001 of the National edition with the headline: Colleges Find Diversity Is Not Just Numbers. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe